Rick Auge, of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Crime Lab Investigator, tests what he thinks is cocaine with cobalt thiocyanate which turned the substance blue. After the testing was complete it was cocaine. Under the new uniform evidence retention policy evidence such as drugs and bodily fluids will be packaged in heat sealed packaging which is already done by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Crime Lab.

During an oft-contentious court hearing on the St. Paul crime lab’s troubles, one of the unit’s criminalists testified that although some of her testing showed signs of contamination, she didn’t particularly document it or worry about it.

The lab worker, Roberta DeCrans, also told a judge that although she had protocols for trying to avoid contaminating samples of suspected narcotics that she was testing, they were not written down, as most scientists’ protocols are.

DeCrans testified in Dakota County District Court in Hastings on Wednesday, Aug. 22, in a continued hearing into whether suspected narcotics analyzed by the troubled crime lab should be admissible in court in several cases.

She took the witness stand only after prosecutors and defense attorneys spent nearly three hours arguing over whether the scope of the evidentiary hearing, which began last month, should be limited.

They argued over how cooperative each side had been, whether evidence had been turned over and whether witnesses had been told to stay silent. They even argued over whether they were dealing with six defendants or seven.

On Tuesday, Phillip Prokopowicz, the county’s chief deputy prosecutor, asked Judge Kathryn Davis Messerich to halt the hearing. He contended it was no longer needed because his office had agreed to not use the crime lab’s test results in the six cases. Or seven.

He said the county has asked the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to retest samples in the cases, so the reason for the consolidated hearing had evaporated. Instead, he said, the evidentiary issues were best dealt with individually as each case comes to trial.

But public defenders Lauri Traub and Christine Funk maintained that even with BCA retesting, the samples still cannot be trusted as evidence. The reason: The St. Paul lab was so bungling and slipshod that the samples probably were contaminated while in the lab.

“Each case has the very same problem — it has been inside a lab with inadequate procedures,” said Funk, who is with the Minnesota Public Defender’s Office.

She told Messerich that BCA tests still would fail to establish “foundational reliability,” the legal test for admitting scientific evidence in court.

After arguments and lunch, the judge split the difference. She ruled that the hearing could continue and that Traub and Funk could call witnesses, but they could be questioned only about issues related to possible contamination.

“There are no shortcuts to due process,” the judge said, adding that she had to find out if defendants’ rights had been violated by shoddy testing.

The hearing continued a proceeding that began in July with three days of testimony. During those days, several witnesses — including DeCrans — testified about the unaccredited lab’s lack of written standard operating procedures, the staff’s poor training and the absence of documentation of tests performed. One expert witness said he would expect better science from a freshman chemistry student.

The hearing’s disclosures were felt quickly. St. Paul Police Chief Thomas Smith suspended the lab’s testing of suspected narcotics and reassigned its longtime head. Prosecutors in Ramsey, Dakota and Washington counties — the lab’s biggest customers — said they were taking their drug testing elsewhere.

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman also said the city would explore whether the lab should make improvements needed to seek accreditation from the American Society of Crime Lab Directors, or ASCLD.

But the hearing’s testimony also was quickly felt in court. Prokopowicz told Messerich that his office has identified 155 cases in which suspected drugs were tested by the St. Paul lab, and those cases — scheduled for trial between now and March — were on hold while the evidence is assessed or retested.

The prosecutor also told the judge that since the controversy erupted, the police department has told him that the lab did have written standard operating procedures in place and that some dated to the 1990s. But he admitted that whether the analysts who worked in the lab knew about them or followed them “is a question of debate.”

After the judge ruled the hearing could continue, the two sides decided to call DeCrans, who has been with the lab for four years. Then the lawyers argued over which side would call her as its witness. In the end, Traub was allowed to call her to the stand.

DeCrans’ testimony quickly became densely technical, mainly because she was asked about her operation of the crime lab’s two gas chromatograph-mass spectrometers. The devices are the lab’s main tools to analyze the chemical composition of suspected narcotics.

Lawyer and witness soon began throwing around terms such as “retention time,” “column bleed,” “ion peak” and “background subtract.”

The gist of it, from Traub’s standpoint, was that testing done in one of the cases showed evidence that the device or samples may be contaminated.

At one point, Traub showed her copies of computer graphs produced by the device that indicated that a test of solvent — meant to clean the tool — showed possible adulteration.

“There could also be contamination in the solvent,” Traub noted, projecting the graphs on a screen.

“I guess it would depend on what these came up to be, and what you’re calling ‘contamination,’ ” DeCrans replied.

Prokopowicz objected frequently during her testimony, and DeCrans’ recollection about specific tests was often wanting. At one point, Traub asked her if she had had anybody else in the lab double-check her test results — a required practice in ASCLD-accredited labs — and DeCrans replied, “I can’t say for sure.” When confronted with apparent inconsistencies between her testimony Wednesday and in last month’s hearing, she explained that she wanted to “expand” or correct her earlier answers.

Under cross-examination by Prokopowicz, DeCrans said she had never seen drug samples left unattended, or tampered with or contaminated.

The hearing resumes Friday, with DeCrans returning. Both sides said they would be calling other witnesses.

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